Director: Tomas Alfredson

Runtime: 115mins

Director Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In is a heavily abridged adaptation of Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 horror novel, reducing the weighty and dark Stephen King-influenced book to a fetchingly spare tale of love-slash-friendship between two young outcasts. Jettisoning some of the novel’s more discomforting elements, including an undead paedophile, the film version focuses primarily on the relationship between Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a bullied 12 year-old boy growing up in Stockholm’s housing projects with his separated mother; and Eli (Lina Leandersson), a mysterious girl seemingly his same age who only appears outdoors at night. Mercilessly abused by some toughs at school, Oskar has violent revenge fantasies and keeps a scrapbook of newspaper murder reports. Eli, on the other hand, has an almost Renfield-like servant called Håkan (Per Ragnar) out and about committing murders for her, because, given she’s actually a several hundred year-old vampire, she needs the blood.

Despite the obvious differences between the two, a friendship develops between Oskar and Eli. She convinces him to stick up for himself, and he in turn protects her when blood supplies are interrupted and Eli is forced to go hunting for herself. Other lives are affected as a result of Eli’s eternal hunger – the ‘infection’ that grows in the heart like a cancer, as one character describes it – and the snow-covered walkways between the imposing and colourless apartment buildings are soon splashed with blood from more than one victim.

Elegantly paced and beautifully acted by the two young leads, the icy minimalism of Stockholm’s urban environment is the perfect location for this understated (albeit bloody) horror film. Plot elements explicit in the book but left unexplained in the film (such as the history of Eli’s startling disfigurement revealed late in the story) actually serve to give the tale an air of mystery that makes the unusual friendship more credible. There is much that Oskar and Eli don’t know or understand about one another, but they do know they’ve each found someone who stops them from feeling truly lonely, and that, for the film’s purpose, is what matters.

There are some great scenes and a few genuinely creepy moments, and despite a few plot holes left by the adaptation, you still come away thinking that Let The Right One In easily beats a dozen Hollywood J-horror remakes. Plus it hasn’t been soured with mass-marketed overkill a la Twilight (although a Hollywood version is sadly already in the works). Given the title is taken from a Morrissey lyric, perhaps Moz will contribute some songs to the American version’s soundtrack? Of course, if that happens, you might as well believe in vampires.

****

TOPHER HEALY

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